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Mike Andrade

Climate change is the defining issue of our generation, and we believe that solar energy is one of the best tools that we have to deal with that. We create solutions that make solar more efficient and more broadly used.

Tell us about yourself?

I am an engineer who has worked in the technology business for over 30 years. I believe that technology plays a critical role in solving climate change. I am not a politician but a manufacturing technology practitioner, so this is how I am going to help on that front.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Watch out for Covid-19? On a serious note, I have been through many challenging times in my career, but the combination of everything that has happened was almost unprecedented and has been extremely difficult to manage through. We have done a good job getting through this, and we are on to better things, so I guess my advice would be to stay the course.

What problem does your business solve?

Morgan Solar

Doing our piece to reduce the impact of climate change by making solar plants and buildings more efficient.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

Solar is not about solar panels creating electricity, but of sunlight. We think the issue with solar is not the lack of solar energy; more solar energy hits the world in an hour than the world uses in a year. The issue with solar energy is to get more of what you want from the sun (light and energy) and less of what you don’t want (undue heat and glare). So, we needed to think of solar not as an issue of just generating electricity but as dealing with the light to make it do what we wanted.

What is your magic sauce?

Fifteen years of creating the best in the world tools and the know-how to design, analyze, build and monitor advanced solar technology products.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

The next five years are critical for the world to avoid the worst of climate change. We believe that the frontier for solar is in the built environment, where solar has the unique ability to generate power at the place where most of it is used, cities. So, we want to show that it is possible to move to a completely different model of building energy efficiency, where the buildings become the utility system. This can only happen with local solar generation at scale as well as improved energy efficiency to reduce their demand. All of this needs to be dynamically adjust to how much energy is hitting the buildings from the sun.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Arthur C. Clarke has a quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We have created products that appear to do magical things: create better building environments for workers, while reducing the energy a building requires all the while generating more power than traditional solar panels, as an example. We need to have these products in place and demonstrated for long periods of time to get a skeptical public to believe that they can do this. It has been difficult to do this in the Covid-19 world, where people have not even been in their offices and stores for a couple of years.

How can people get involved?

If you have a solar installation or you have a building, we have a solution. You can use our simple web based application to model what is possible to do, and then we can work with you to create the right solution based on data. Become part of the solution, visit our website.